The best affiliate marketing strategies can help your brand drive more sales in 2024.
It is a highly cost-effective lead generation tactic where you pay solely for performance.
That’s why more brands are leveraging this performance-based marketing tactic more often.
Google Trends data also suggests that the number of searches for “affiliate marketing” has grown significantly over the past five years.
These searches likely come from both brands and affiliates as affiliate marketing can help them both grow.
What is Affiliate Marketing?
To summarize, affiliate marketing is a type of advertising that involves an affiliate, like an influencer, promoting a company’s product or service for a commission on every sale.
Affiliate marketing is prevalent in influencer marketing as well as on blogs.
The goal of influencer marketing is to drive sales by using a source that users trust, to promote a product or service.
Best Affiliate Marketing Strategies to Grow Your Brand
Many successful brands work with a lot of affiliates to increase their sales and grow their brand. But not all of them use the same techniques to increase the visibility and demand for their products.
In fact, there are several different affiliate marketing strategies and channels you can leverage.
1. Choose the Right Affiliates
Affiliate marketing allows you to leverage the power of influence to get people to buy from you.
If you want to influence consumers' buying decisions, you should choose to work with someone who has an engaged audience that trusts them.
The best way to start finding good-fit affiliates is by using Affiliate Recruitment Software. These tools can help you build processes for discovering and recruiting high-performing affiliates at scale.
When choosing an affiliate to help you with your product promotions, check whether or not:
- They have a good rapport with their audience
- Their audience might be interested in your products or brand
- They have a good following, site ranking, views, engagement, and authority
All of this is important to ensure that your efforts aren't in vain.
An excellent example of a new product using affiliate marketing to their advantage is GFUEL.
GFUEL is an energy drink mix aimed at the gaming community. It was established in 2012.
As affiliate marketing, especially with influencers, became the norm, they reached out to one of the largest gaming influencers on YouTube, Pewdiepie.
Pewdiepie currently has over 100 million subscribers and does plenty of marketing for GFUEL with promo codes, discounts, and affiliate linking.
2. Attract Sales with Coupons, Deals, and Promotions
Everybody loves a great deal.
Leveraging coupons and deals is one of the best affiliate marketing strategies to boost sales. That’s because many consumers love the savings power of coupons. They often search for discount vouchers on various coupon and deals sites before shopping for any product.
Check out these statistics to understand consumers’ love for coupons and deals.
Many coupon and deal websites allow you to attract more customers by offering a significant discounts. Groupon and Offers.com are a few such sites that you can use to drive huge traffic to your business and increase conversions.
Coupons work best in markets that are highly competitive such as food, beauty, travel, or gadgets. However, you need to manage them well as an extravagant discount offer might simply eat into your margins.
To make the most out of your coupon affiliate marketing strategies, choose to work with a few, high-quality sites. See where their visitors come from. Do they highly rely on search traffic or do they have a user base of their own?
You should also check the authenticity of their site. Try using their coupon codes for a few popular brands. If they don’t work, it’s a red flag.
3. Leverage the Power of Niche Influencers
Influencer marketing has become much more than a buzzword in recent years. And brands are continuously learning to tap into this source of referrals effectively.
Many brands choose to work with a large number of social influencers and bloggers in their niches. Influencers have more authentic relationships with their followers. They can effectively get their audience to trust your brand and convince them to use your products or services.
Influencers may not send you huge amounts of traffic compared to coupon sites. But the audience they send is targeted and more likely to be interested in your product.
Thus, you can boost your conversion rates with effective affiliate partnerships with influencers.
While most influencers expect monetary compensation, many agree to work for free products or a portion of each sale they drive as well.
How Can You Track Sales?
To track the number of sales that an influencer is driving for your website, you can use tools like Voluum. It helps you monitor a wide variety of parameters like referrer links, browser versions, devices, creatives, and more.
Nordstrom Rack, a US fashion retailer, gifted their products to several influencers. The influencers then featured those products in their blog posts and social media posts effectively. This series of posts helped them reach 500,000 potential customers and cost-effectively increase sales.
However, to get the best results, you need to associate with influencers who are relevant to your brand. This demands that you look at much more than their following size.
You need to analyze various metrics to see if an influencer is fit for your affiliate marketing strategies. A few important metrics that you should check include their:
- Reach
- Engagement
- Audience demographics
- Follower growth over time
- Alignment with your brand's values and niche
All of these factors contribute to whether or not an influencer is a good fit for your affiliate marketing program.
How to Improve Reporting
To improve the reporting from your influencers, you can use Voluum. This tool helps them understand their performance through detailed reports, and they can share the same with you too. As a result, you’ll be able to figure out which influencers are performing better than the rest.
4. Build a Robust Affiliate Network
Instead of tapping into various affiliate networks, build your own. It can be really difficult to recruit your first few affiliates. But expanding your affiliate network is comparatively easier.
To attract affiliates, you should follow a clear, to-the-point approach. Provide your potential affiliates with all of the necessary information such as what to do, how it works, and the commission you’ll pay.
You should also encourage your affiliates to recruit more sub-affiliates. You can offer them a small commission of the sales that their sub-affiliates drive. That can be quite encouraging.
You should always take some time to appreciate and reward your most loyal affiliates. Track their performance, and analyze the lifetime value of the customers they bring to your brand.
How to Track Performance
To track their performance, you can use tools like Voluum. The platform allows you to see your reports in real-time with details of 30 data points to help you understand the performance of your campaign.
You can reward them with a slightly higher commission rate in the future. You can also offer them benefits such as buying any product at the best price or one free delivery every month.
These affiliate marketing strategies can help you build a strong network and encourage affiliates to give their best shots.
Amazon Associates is one of the largest and most successful online affiliate programs in the world. They have a network of over 900,000 affiliates who proudly promote various products listed on the e-commerce site.
5. Leverage Affiliate Promotions From Multiple Sources
Instead of focusing on just Instagram influencers or coupon sites, spend the time to reach out to your audience through affiliates from multiple sources.
You can test a variety of affiliate marketing strategies to see which audience responds the best and is the easiest to reach.
Some promising sources to leverage affiliate promotions include:
- Product review blogs: A review-focused affiliate blog can help you promote your products effectively. They are more likely to drive customers who are really interested in making a purchase.
- Email marketing: Affiliates with a huge list of email subscribers in your niche can help you drive more conversions.
- Webinars: Experts who host webinars on topics relevant to your niche can also be an amazing source of targeted leads. With an audience who trusts their recommendations, they can boost your affiliate marketing strategies.
- YouTube videos: Getting your products featured by a popular YouTuber can help you drive instant sales. After all, 40% of millennials admit that their favorite YouTubers understand them better than their friends.
Using multiple platforms can help you drive the best results from your affiliate marketing strategies. This can also help you analyze the platform which your audience is most engaged.
Which Channel is Best?
To track the effectiveness of each channel to drive traffic and sales, you can use Voluum. It can help you track your traffic from multiple sources, and you can also find out your ROI using it.
6. Optimize Your Product Pages for Conversions
Many brands invest in affiliate marketing strategies and expect their affiliates to drive conversions on their own. You can't rely completely on your affiliates and sit back to watch sales come in.
Affiliate marketing can help you to drive interested consumers to your product pages. But it’s your job to make sure that they buy your product once they reach there.
If you want to generate more sales, you should deliver a good customer experience to them. For this, you need to optimize your product pages to boost conversions. It’s simple, just make sure that:
- Your site loads fast
- You provide sufficient information to help your customers buy the product they want
- You display impressive, high-quality product photos that grab your visitors’ attention
- Your product descriptions include engaging copy that speaks of your brand and tells them why they should buy from you
- You should clearly feature customer reviews to build trust
For this, you can use leverage tools such as Voluum. It has a traffic distribution AI that can help you direct traffic to high-impact pages.
You can also set up customized rules for directing traffic to various pages of your website. It’s also possible to conduct A/B tests to figure out which campaign paths are performing better.
Optimized product pages can give a boost to your affiliate marketing strategies and effort. They can help you retain more customers.
In fact, you can also use your product pages to upsell and cross-sell relevant products.
7. Keep an Eye on Trending Influencers
It’s not easy to know who will be trending next, but if you work with an influencer that starts trending, you’ll see a significant increase in leads and sales.
The best way to find trending influencers is by following trends. Go on social media apps like Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter and look at what’s trending and which influencers are actively posting with hashtags related to the trend.
Another great way to work with influencers that are trending is by using an influencer marketing platform to connect with them.
8. Run Ads Around Peak Shopping Times
Holiday times see a large increase in spending, especially if those products are related to the holiday.
Retail sales figures show that certain markets like jewelry, electronics, and toys/hobbies have a larger last-quarter percentage than the rest of the year.
This is due to large holidays falling during those months like Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years.
That makes it the best time to get your product out to affiliate marketers to start advertising.
9. Leverage micro-influencers
Mega influencers, influencers with more than 1 million followers, might sound like an enticing venture, but they can be costly.
This is especially true for mega influencers who have over 100 million followers. Someone like Christiano Ronaldo, who has over 400 million followers on Instagram is getting paid up to $1 million USD for a sponsored post.
For most businesses, even larger ones, that might be too expensive. But don’t worry, there is a growing trend of micro-influencer marketing taking the marketing world by storm.
Micro-influencers have between 1,000 and 100,000 followers.
According to a survey done by Shopify, 77% of marketers say that micro-influencers are on top of their lists of ideal influencers.
Micro-influencers cost a lot less and allow you as a brand to possibly market to a wider audience by recruiting a larger number of micro-influencers than a single mega-influencer.
Not just that, but micro-influencers have more dedicated and better-targeted audiences, which means if you find the right micro-influencer, chances are you will have a higher engagement rate than those of macro and mega influencers.
Studies have shown that micro-influencers have between 7-10% engagement rates, whereas macro-influencers are lucky to get 5%.
FAQs
Q1. What is an affiliate marketing strategy?
A. Affiliate marketing is the process of hiring affiliates to promote your business and giving them a commission on every sale that they are responsible for. There are many ways in which you can use affiliate marketing and these are called affiliate marketing strategies.
An affiliate marketing strategy can also refer to the type of payment model that you choose for your affiliates. Some common types of affiliate payment strategies are pay-per-click, pay-per-lead, and pay-per-sale.
Q2. Which affiliate marketing strategy is the most effective?
A. The most commonly used and easiest affiliate marketing strategy is pay-per-click. Affiliates are paid a small commission on every click that they get on their promotional links. However, such leads may or may not convert, so that is a potential drawback.
You can, however, use deals and offers to convert such leads into customers. You can also ask your affiliates to promote the offers and bring in leads with purchase intent.
Q3. What are the advantages of affiliate marketing?
A. Affiliate marketing gives your affiliates an incentive to promote your business and makes them your brand advocates. The more people who promote your brand, the better your chances of getting new customers. So, the main advantage of affiliate marketing is that it can help you win more leads and improve your brand awareness.
Q4. How can I create an affiliate marketing strategy?
A. To create an affiliate marketing strategy, you must first design and launch a good affiliate program. For this, you will need to determine a good payment model that you would like to follow to pay your affiliates. The key is to make the affiliate program lucrative enough for people to want to join, without it draining your budget.
So, an ideal affiliate marketing strategy would be one that is mutually beneficial for all parties.
Q5. Is affiliate marketing using paid media a good strategy?
A. It is only beneficial if the benefit derived from paid advertising is more than the cost. So, this is actually best determined on a case-by-case basis.
However, affiliate marketing is a good technique in itself without the need to integrate it with paid advertising.
Q6. How can I maximize my affiliate marketing?
A. You can maximize the results of your affiliate marketing by providing your affiliates with lucrative deals and offers that they can promote. This will ensure that you not only get more clicks or leads but also gain more customers.
Q7. How do I become an affiliate marketer for beginners?
A. You should first select the field or niche in which you have some influence and then look for businesses in your niche that have affiliate programs. Then, you can compare the different programs and choose the most lucrative ones to join.
You can then use your website, social media, and other platforms to promote your affiliate brands and start earning from those referrals.
Q8. Where can I promote affiliate links?
A. Social media platforms and blogs are two of the best places to promote affiliate links. You can create engaging social media content and promote your affiliate links there. You can also choose to create blog posts on a topic in which you can add your affiliate links.
Which is the Best Affiliate Marketing Strategy?
There’s no doubt that the best affiliate marketing strategies can help you attract customers and convince them to buy from you.
In fact, 38% of marketers consider affiliate marketing as one of the top customer acquisition methods.
But you need to realize that it can’t happen overnight. You need to choose the right affiliates, channels, and affiliate marketing strategies to boost conversions.
Have you ever used affiliate marketing for your business? Which strategy do you find to be the most effective? Please share with us in the comments below.
These are some great strategies. Thank you so much!
Awesome guidance.Thanks!
Great post about affiliate marketing strategies.
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The points in the blog are really well made and the information is truly effective.
Very good!
This is a million-dollar post. I’ve read it and I love it. I never knew some of these strategies could help me generate more traffic and sales. Thanks a lot.
I like this article because it was helpful and educational.
Thank you so much. I’m glad my article about affiliate marketing strategies was helpful to you.
Very valuable strategies. I’ll definitely use these to generate more sales.
That is awesome news! Let me know how it goes! 😉
Hi Ali, that’s so nice of you to say. So excited to know that you enjoyed reading my post about Affiliate Marketing Strategies.